Were Adam and Eve Africans ?

Consider the following two reports from BBC news, both written by the same author as he
reviews the results of two different genetic studies. Note the differences.

Wednesday, 6 December,
2000, 19:42 GMT

Genetic study roots humans in
Africa

By BBC News Online science editor Dr David
Whitehouse

New evidence for the so-called Out of Africa hypothesis of modern
humans suggests that our ancestors migrated from the continent about
50,000 years ago.

This is the first study in which the genome is
being used in a sufficiently large number of individuals to come up
with very strong evidence ... supporting the Out of Africa
theory

Prof Ulf Gyllensten

Researchers
from the University of Uppsala, Sweden, have based their analysis on the
genetic make-up of 53 humans from diverse geographic and ethnic
backgrounds.

By looking at the individuals' shared, maternally inherited DNA
sequences, together with a knowledge of how this genetic material changes
over time, the scientists have been able to trace our common ancestry.

As well as showing the evolutionary tree is firmly rooted in Africa,
their study even suggests human numbers may have dwindled to just 40,000
at one stage.

Rival theories

There are two competing theories to explain how mankind spread across
the globe.

One suggests that between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago modern man
(Homo sapiens) emerged from Africa to slowly populate the rest of
the world, replacing any species of human that were already there. This is
the Out of Africa hypothesis.

The other theory suggests that modern humans arose simultaneously in
Africa, Europe and Asia from one of our predecessors, Homo erectus,
who left Africa about two million years ago.

In recent years, support for the Out of Africa theory has come from the
study of DNA in mitochondria, the energy-generating structures that reside
just outside a cell's nucleus. This mtDNA, as it is known, is inherited
only from females. It also mutates - errors appear - at a steady rate,
meaning it can be used as a "molecular clock" to investigate human
history.

Deep branches

Critics argued such analysis was based on a small section, about 7%, of
the mtDNA and this might cause problems in determining the genetic
distance between individuals. With the data available it was not possible
to trace the mtDNA lineage back to sub-Saharan Africa, they argued.

But the Swedish group have overcome some of the original shortcomings
by carrying out an analysis of the complete mitochondrial genomes of their
53 subjects.

The new analysis suggests the three deepest branches on the new mtDNA
family tree all go back to sub-Saharan Africa and there is another branch
that contains both African and non-African mtDNA.

"This is the first study in which the genome is being used in a
sufficiently large number of individuals to come up with very strong
evidence, in this case supporting the Out of Africa theory," lead
researcher Professor Ulf Gyllensten said.

Sports stadia

What seems particularly significant is that the amount of mtDNA
diversity among Africans is more than twice as great as the diversity seen
among non-Africans.

The data also show some evidence of a "population bottleneck" when the
number of humans fell to a low level. It happened about 40,000 years ago
when there could have been as few as 40,000 humans - a number less than
many national sports stadia would hold.

The researchers may have also identified the stock of people from whom
all non-Africans descended.

They write in the journal Nature: "A group of six African (mtDNA)
sequences are genetically distant to those of other Africans, but share a
common ancestor with non-Africans. These lineages represent descendants of
a population that evidently gave rise to all the non-African lineages."

The researchers believe all humans alive today could share common
ancestry with a being in Africa who lived about 120,000 to 220,000 years
ago.

(copied from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1058484.stm)

Monday, 9 June,
2000, 19:42 GMT

When humans faced extinction

By BBC News Online science editor Dr David
Whitehouse

The study
suggests that at one point there may have been only 2,000
individuals alive as our species teetered on the brink.

This means that, for a while, humanity was in a perilous state,
vulnerable to disease, environmental disasters and conflict. If any
of these factors had turned against us, we would not be here.

The research also suggests that humans (Homo sapiens
sapiens) made their first journey out of Africa as recently as
70,000 years ago.

Little diversity

Unlike our close genetic relatives - chimps - all humans have
virtually identical DNA. In fact, one group of chimps can have more
genetic diversity than all of the six billion humans alive today.

It is thought we spilt from a common ancestor with chimps 5-6
million years ago, more than enough time for substantial genetic
differences to develop.

The absence of those differences suggests to some researchers
that the human gene pool was reduced to a small size in the recent
past, thereby wiping out genetic variation between current
populations.

Evidence for that view is published in the American Journal of
Human Genetics.

Oldest members

Because all humans have virtually identical DNA, geneticists look
for subtle differences between populations.

These microsatellites have a high mutation, or error, rate as
they are passed from generation to generation, making them a useful
tool to study when two populations diverged.

Researchers from Stanford University, US, and the Russian Academy
of Sciences compared 377 microsatellite markers in DNA collected
from 52 regions around the world.

Analysis revealed a close genetic kinship between two
hunter-gatherer populations in sub-Saharan Africa - the Mbuti
pygmies of the Congo Basin and the Khosian bushmen of Botswana.

First migration

The researchers believe that they are "the oldest branch of
modern humans studied here".

The data also reveals that the separation between the
hunter-gatherer populations and farmers in Africa occurred between
70,000 and 140,000 years ago. Modern man's migration out of Africa
would have occurred after this.

An earlier genetic study - involving the Y chromosomes of more
than 1,000 men from 21 populations - concluded that the first human
migration from Africa may have occurred about 66,000 years ago.

The small genetic diversity of modern humans indicates that at
some stage during the last 100,000 years, the human population
dwindled to a very low level.

It was out of this small population, with its consequent limited
genetic diversity, that today's humans descended.

Small pool

Estimates of how small the human population became vary but 2,000
is the figure suggested in the latest research.

"This estimate does not preclude the presence of other
populations of Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man) in Africa,
although it suggests that they were probably isolated from each
other genetically," they say.

The authors of the study believe that contemporary worldwide
populations descended from one or very few of these populations.

If this is the case, humanity came very close to extinction.

(copied from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2975862.stm)

Out of Africa 50,000 or 70,000 years ago ??

Only 40,000 or 2,000 individuals were our ancestors ??

"Richard Klein, professor of anthropological sciences, in his book,
The Dawn of Human Culture (John Wiley & Sons, April 2002),
proposes a "new" theory for the latest stages of human evolution.
"It's a nontestable hypothesis," Klein admits. "The book is about
human evolution as I understand the record. My genetic explanation
for the major behavioral change 50,000 years ago is the most
plausible one, but I can't prove it."
For Klein this neural mutation hypothesis is the most economical
explanation of why anatomy and human behavior drifted apart.
Fossilized skulls reveal little about the brain underneath.
But a gene mutation may have changed critical neural processes
such as speech and language.

The now widely accepted "Out-of-Africa-2" hypothesis is based
on the appearance of anatomically and behaviorally modern humans
on a small patch in Eastern Africa as recently as 50,000 years ago.
All of a sudden these early modern humans developed a new repertoire
of hunting skills, novel forms of social interaction and a sense
of art. They became creative innovators expanding their
mental and technical capabilities. These new achievements drove
the early modern humans out of Africa to spread over Europe and
Asia. Within a short period of only about 15,000 years they
supplanted the Neanderthals in Europe and other nonmodern humans
in other parts of the world.

The cause for the drastic change in behavior in the early modern
humans is unknown. But the most plausible explanation for the
success of modern humans is a sudden biological change.

"A fortuitous mutation may have promoted the fully modern brain,"

Klein says. As human brains reached today's size hundreds of thousands
of years earlier and skull size didn't change drastically,
this mutation would have affected cognitive power rather than
overall brain structure. ...

In his phylogeny on page 78 shown below we see many tentative dotted bars and also many
question marks! Note the many supposedly dead ended branches! AND:

Where is the LINK??

(Stanford Report, April 26, 2002,
"Anthropologist explores the dawn of human culture in new book"
by Christian Heuss and "The Dawn of Human Culture" by Richard G. Klein
with Blake Edgar, 2002)

Then is this Adam and Eve, are they among the "out of Africa" group
that appeared around 50,000 years ago ?

Problem: the Scriptures definitely tell of an Adam and Eve that lived in the "Garden of
Eden" which was located somewhere near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Then consider the following evidences!

"The great majority of the cultivated plants of the world trace their origin
to Asia. Out of 640 important cultivated plants, about 500 originated in
Southern Asia. In Asia alone we have established five of the principle regions
of cultivated plants.... The fifth region of origin in Asia is the
Southwestern Asiatic centre and includes Asia Minor, Trans-Caucasia, Iran and
Western Turkmenistan. This region is remarkable, first of all, for its
richness in numbers of species of wheat resistant to different
diseases...There is no doubt that Armenia is the chief home of cultivated
wheat. Asia Minor and Trans-Caucasia gave origin to rye which is represented
here by a great number of varieties and species....

Our studies show definitely that Asia is not only the home of the majority
of modern cultivated plants, but also of our chief domesticated animals such
as the cow, the yak, the buffalo, sheep, goat, horse, and pig...The
chief home of the cow and other cattle, the Oriental type of horse, the goat
and the sheep is specifically Iran....

As the result of a brilliant work of Dr. Sinskaya, the discovery was
recently made that the home of alfalfa, the world's most important forage
crop, is located in Trans-Caucasia and Iran....

From all these definitely established facts the importance of Asia as the
primary home of the greatest majority of cultivated plants and domesticated
animals is quite clear."

The above quotes from the book by
Vavilov, N. , "Asia: Source of Species" in Asia, February 1937,
p. 113.

More recent studies conducted by Melinda A Zeder and Brian Hesse (Science
287 (2000) 2254-57) place the initial domestication of goats to the Zargos
Mountains at about 10,000 years ago. And Manfred Heun's (Science 278 (1997) 1312-14)
studies indicate that large scale wheat cultivation began from 8,000 to 9,000 years
ago near the Karacadag Mountains. Both areas are very near where the Tigris and
Euphrates Rivers come close together.

"The cradle of agriculture generally has been placed in the Jordan Valley of the
southern Levant (today's Israel and Jordan). But work by Simcha Lev-Yadun of
Israel's Agricultural Research Organization and colleagues suggest the first
farms may have been farther north, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in
what is today northeastern Turkey and northern Syria.Wild progenitors of the main Neolithic founder crops (einkorn wheat, emmer wheat,
barley, lentil, pea, chickpea, bitter vetch, and flax) are found together only
in this small core area of the Fertile Crescent.
Lev-Yadun reports that wild chickpea especially is extremely rare, yet it was a
staple crop of Neolithic life 10,000 years ago. Agriculture, therefore, probably
began in an area where chickpea is native. Archaeological evidence shows that the
earliest known farming settlements of the Fertile Crescent were in this core area.
Also, the limited genetic variability of these crops implies that they were
domesticated only once — rather than by several different cultures at roughly
the same time. Evidence of domesticated crops in the core area dates to about
10,000 years ago, while the earliest signs of farming elsewhere are about 9,300
years ago.
Neolithic sites discovered in the core area indicate that a society with plenty
of food thrived there. In sites such as Cayonu, Novali Cori, and Gobekli Tepe,
impressive architecture, images, and artifacts have been found. Settlement sites
are also larger in this area than many others of the same time in other parts
of the Fertile Crescent. ..." (From "The Cradle of Agriculture? New Evidence
Moves the World's First Farmers into Turkey" by Reagan Duplisea,
http://www.discoveringarchaeology.com/ articles/ 060100-turkeyfarm.shtml)

"It is known that agriculture spread from the Middle East to Europe during the
Neolithic period about 12,000 years ago, but for many years archeologists have
debated how this occurred. Was it due to the movement of people or to the movement
of ideas? Previous genetic analysis of people living today suggests a
migration - that the people moved - but critics have questioned this view.
The latest study reinforces evidence of a migration in which people brought
their ideas and lifestyle with them." (from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases /2002/09/ 020911072622.htm)

Professor Klein and many others do not consider the evidences for the appearance of a
group of intelligent farming and building humans sometime before 12,000
years ago in their analysis of human culture!
Also considering Professor Klein's theoried "fortuitous mutation ... affected
cognitive power rather than overall brain structure", could this be the first stages
of the development of "accountability", the ability of humans to have a social conscience,
the ability to understand the differences between right and wrong, which is so much
a part of the Scriptual story of Adam and Eve, and which separates humans from the
rest of the primates? This development which was finalized in the "Garden of Eden"!
Also let us not forget the concept of "dominion". The humans of the "Garden of Eden"
had the capability to dominate over all other living creatures on the earth,
a capability fully demonstrated only by the migrants out of the 'Ararat" area as they
developed their methods of farming, animal domestication and community building.

As per the Scriptures, these latter evidences indicate that the
humans who demonstrated the highest level of intellect
came from the area of "Ararat" and "Eden" and not from Africa.
That Adam and Eve were farmers and not hunter/gatherers!

As he awoke on
his last day on earth, it is unlikely Toumai thought about much more than
how he would survive the following hour - let alone that, 7m years later,
a bunch of ape-like creatures would be furiously discussing how much they
resembled him.

Today, three months after the sensational announcement in Britain's
leading scientific journal, Nature, that the oldest member of the human
family had been found, the same journal publishes a sustained attack by
rival scientists on the contention that Toumai's skull is, in fact, that
of a hominid.

Few regions of science provoke more passion than the nature of the
evolutionary journey from early ape-like mammals to homo sapiens, and
other palaeontologists began grumbling about the sapience of the skull's
French discoverer, Michel Brunet, as soon as his press release, with the
bold claim "Toumai the Human Ancestor", hit the news media.

Today's attack on Professor Brunet and his colleagues in Nature -
accompanied by a harshly worded rebuttal from Prof Brunet himself - ups
the ante, putting doubts about whether the skull is hominid, ape, both or
neither into the orthodox scientific arena.

Much is at stake - science, individual reputations, careers, research
grants. Beneath this clash, however, lies the deeper and more disturbing
question about when humans end and non-humans begin.

The skull was found in the Djurab desert of northern Chad by a team led
by Prof Brunet of the University of Poitiers, who said at the time that it
had been the culmination of 25 years' searching.

Prof Brunet, backed by independent scientists, claimed that the skull
and jaw fragments provided enough evidence to show that we were looking
into the face of the earliest hominid ever discovered.

The excitement around the discovery - it was proclaimed "a turning
point", "a small nuclear bomb", and "the most important fossil discovery
in living memory" - came because the skull's age put it in the middle of a
5m-year gap in our knowledge, between the accepted ancient apes and the
accepted ancient hominids.

Today, another group of scientists, two based in France, two in the US,
present a point-by-point demolition of Prof Brunet's case, arguing that
there is no evidence to suggest Toumai was a hominid. "We believe [Toumai]
was an ape," they conclude.

Prof Brunet's defenders point out that two of the authors of the
critique, Brigitte Senut of France's National Museum of Natural History
and Martin Pickford of the College of France, are direct rivals, having
discovered their own candidate for oldest hominid in Kenya two years ago.

But another member of the anti-Brunet camp, John Hawks of the
University of Wisconsin in Madison, pointed out that he had no axe to
grind.

"There are social benefits that come from having the earliest
hominids," he admitted. "You get your grants renewed, and the world at
your door. I don't have a lot invested in it myself. My co-authors do, but
I am not out digging these things up. I just read something I didn't find
convincing."

Mr Hawks and his colleagues do not dispute the age of the fossil, or
even its importance, but argue there is not enough evidence to put it in
on the human side of the primate family tree, and much to link it with
gorillas or chimpanzees.

Toumai's teeth have at least as much in common with early apes as they
do with hominids, they say. Features like the large brow ridge are indeed
seen in relatively recent human ancestors, but not in earlier, known
hominids - meaning the brow would have to have evolved one way, then back,
then evolved again to get into the human family.

Even with only part of a head to go on, critics say, the balance of
evidence suggests the creature could not walk upright.

"The evidence they present is not conclusive, but there's conclusive
evidence that it's not a biped, and therefore we conclude it's not a
hominid," said Milford Wolpoff, of the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor, the fourth member of the anti-Brunet group. "We think it's an ape.
I suppose it could be a female gorilla. To be honest, I think it could be
an ancestor of both chimps and humans before the species split, and
probably this is an extinct branch."

Dr Wolpoff stressed he was not taking issue with the momentous nature
of the find, only the conclusions Prof Brunet had drawn: "It's the only
fossil ape we've got from between 10m years ago and today."

Prof Brunet could not be contacted for comment yesterday. In his
rebuttal, he said his critics had misrepresented the dimensions of Toumai.
"Wolpoff et al have described no derived ape feature of [Toumai], nor have
they disproved any derived features that this species shares with later
hominids."

Henry Gee, a senior editor at Nature, said that the journal had gone to
enormous lengths to verify the original Brunet paper. He had visited
Poitiers twice to see the skull, and the paper had been anonymously
peer-reviewed by five independent scientists in the same field.

Both Prof Brunet and Dr Gee pointed out that in 1925, when Nature
stunned the world with its publication of Raymond Dart's account of his
discovery of a 3.3m-year-old hominid fossil in South Africa, critics said
the skull was that of an ape.

Dr Gee said the critics made interesting points, but were, he felt,
"barking up the wrong tree". "Whatever Toumai is, it shows a combination
of features we haven't seen before in hominids or apes," he said.

Professor Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History
Museum in London, was more cautious, pointing to growing evidence that
human evolution was "bushy" rather than linear.

"It is premature to push the claims too far for any existing fossils to
represent the earliest members of the human family in the present patchy
state of our knowledge," he said.

Large, continuous brow ridge

· Supporters of the hominid theory say this suggests a link to
more recent human ancestors. Critics point out that known early hominids,
younger than Toumai, didn't have the ridge. The same is true of the
creature's vertical face: could these features have evolved, de-evolved,
then re-evolved?

Spine-skull intersection

· Some critics say the hole where the spine enters the skull is
too far forward for Toumai to have walked upright. Supporters of the
hominid theory say this cannot be known

Thickened enamel on molars

· Critics say this feature means Toumai was as likely to have
been an ape ancestor - or an evolutionary dead end - as a hominid ancestor

Canine teeth

· Critics say the ratio of the distance between Toumai's canine
teeth and from the canines to the back of the mouth are as chimp-like as
they are hominid-like, and prove nothing

Appendix B:

from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2645183.stm

Friday, 10 January, 2003, 11:20 GMT

Georgian skull's link to our past

By Robert Parsons
in Dmanisi, Georgia

The skull is thought to be 1.8 million
years old

The moment is indelibly
burned into Dato Zhvania's memory.

It had been a day like any other - a day of back-breaking,
painstakingly meticulous work. A day of throbbing, enervating heat.

But as he sifted gingerly through the baked patch of ground before him,
his fingers touched something different.

The team celebrates their
find

His pulse quickened.

The archaeological site at the medieval town of Dmanisi, 80 kilometres
(50 miles) south-west of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, had already
revealed some of its secrets.

Perhaps, just perhaps, this was his turn.

But what emerged as he brushed away the earth was to far exceed his
expectations.

He did not know it yet, but in his hands he held the almost perfectly
preserved skull of the most ancient human being ever found in Europe - 1.8
million years old.

More extraordinary still, it was about to throw into question all
accepted theories about the migration of our ancestors out of Africa.

Dato could not contain his excitement.

A message was sent out to team leader, Davit Lortkipanidze, a
paleoanthropologist at the Georgian State Museum in Tbilisi.

The media were alerted and Dato and his colleagues prepared to
celebrate.

"The first
thing we did was pool together all the money we had - around about $800.
Then we drove around all the villages for miles around and bought every
bottle of champagne we could find."

He shakes his head and smiles to himself at the memory.

We were standing at the spot where the skull had been found, deep
beneath the foundations of the medieval town.

"And you know," he said, "this site is so big and so important that
what we've found so far could be nothing compared with what still lies
beneath the ground."

Ape-like

The remains of seven individuals have been found at Dmanisi - the most
recent this summer - but what made this discovery so special was that it
did not look like the skull of any human ever found outside Africa before.

Its brain cavity was far smaller - half the size of a modern human -
and it had the huge canine teeth and thin brow of an ape.

The skull variation may force us to rethink the
definition Homo

This
was not the tall, upright, big-brained Homo erectus we had assumed
the first humans to leave Africa to have been.

This guy was short, long-armed and probably trailed his knuckles along
the ground.

Not only that, the tools found around him were basic choppers and
cutters, just like those found at the sites of early, primitive men in
Africa.

Dato Lortkipanidze thought he recognised Homo habilis, a hominid
with a close resemblance to an ape.

But what was he doing in Georgia? The theory had always been that the
migration out of Africa had only happened with the evolution of big brains
and the development of the tools and hunting skills to make the exodus
possible.

Early humans

Homo habilis: The first species in the
genus Homo, dating back 1.9 million years, and found only in
Africa

Homo erectus: The first species in the
genus Homo to leave
Africa

The discovery has
opened so many questions about our ancestry that one scientist quipped:
"They ought to put it back into the ground."

Another unusual aspect of the Dmanisi find is that it was discovered in
the same layer of sediment as other hominids with substantially larger
brains - Homo erectus.

Mr Lortkipanidze suggests the variation may force us to rethink the
definition Homo.

Land of origins

The old town of Dmanisi sits atop a promontory formed by the confluence
of the Mashavera and Pinezauri rivers.

Today, it is a picnic spot for visitors from Tbilisi who come to see
the ruins of the early medieval church and castle.

Dmanisi was once an important stopping point on
the Silk Route

Modern Dmanisi
is a short drive away and just a small village, but this was once an
important stopping point on the Silk Route - a trading centre between
Byzantium and Persia.

When I stood on the battlements above the church, I could easily make
out the road the camels used to take and the steam baths once used by the
traders.

It is a place of steep slopes and whispering winds, of forests and
basalt cliffs, but to the north a plateau of cultivated fields stretches
away to the horizon.

This was once savannah - home to rhinoceros, game and sabre-tooth
tigers. Perfect hunting ground for hungry hominids.

Gazing out across this scene 1.8 million years after our ancestors
stumbled out of Africa, I spotted a group of Georgian villagers cheering
on a wrestling match amidst the ruins - a reminder that strife has been
the defining characteristic of our existence ever since.

But for Europeans, Dmanisi is a reminder of something else too.

This, it seems, is where our history began. Dmanisi recalls our common
origins.

Robert Parsons reported from Dmanisi for Europe Direct, which can be
seen on BBC News 24 on 11 January at 1130 GMT, and on 12 January at 0230
GMT and 1430 GMT. The programme can also be seen on BBC World on 15
January at 2230 GMT, on 16 January at 0230 GMT, 0930 GMT and 1730 GMT, on
18 January at 1630 GMT and 2330 GMT, and on 19 January at 0230 GMT and
1930 GMT.